And so the thought of God made a God in the image of a perfect body, having
intercourse with himself and needing no other, but in every part harmonious
and self-contained and truly blessed. The soul was first made by him--the
elder to rule the younger; not in the order in which our wayward fancy has
led us to describe them, but the soul first and afterwards the body. God
took of the unchangeable and indivisible and also of the divisible and
corporeal, and out of the two he made a third nature, essence, which was in
a mean between them, and partook of the same and the other, the intractable
nature of the other being compressed into the same. Having made a compound
of all the three, he proceeded to divide the entire mass into portions
related to one another in the ratios of 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 8, 27, and proceeded
to fill up the double and triple intervals thus--

- over 1, 4/3, 3/2, - over 2, 8/3, 3, - over 4, 16/3, 6, - over 8:
- over 1, 3/2, 2, - over 3, 9/2, 6, - over 9, 27/2, 18, - over 27;

in which double series of numbers are two kinds of means; the one exceeds
and is exceeded by equal parts of the extremes, e.g. 1, 4/3, 2; the other
kind of mean is one which is equidistant from the extremes--2, 4, 6. In
this manner there were formed intervals of thirds, 3:2, of fourths, 4:3,
and of ninths, 9:8. And next he filled up the intervals of a fourth with
ninths, leaving a remnant which is in the ratio of 256:243. The entire
compound was divided by him lengthways into two parts, which he united at
the centre like the letter X, and bent into an inner and outer circle or
sphere, cutting one another again at a point over against the point at
which they cross. The outer circle or sphere was named the sphere of the
same--the inner, the sphere of the other or diverse; and the one revolved
horizontally to the right, the other diagonally to the left. To the sphere
of the same which was undivided he gave dominion, but the sphere of the